djmasturbeat's blog for DVD, BD, anime, music and more

Tag Archives: Miyazaki

– I have 2 different caps direct from the LD. The LDs still suffer from hum, surface noise, clicks, pops (it is the analog mono track), but this is being fussy. Compared to the previous version, these are magnitudes better. I took the cleaner copy and cleaned it up more (eclick, pop removal, removed static and hum as best as I could without making it all sound tinny and adding unwanted transients and removing stuff I wanted, and other crap). Strange issues with the Music + Effects (M+E) track slipping and sliding early or late compared to the Japanese track, though I am kind of getting used to weird crap like this. Not much I can do about most of this. I made a few cuts/splices with added or removed delay, but most of this film has music, or really quiet ambint noise that would sound really terrible with silence cut in. Most of the sfx shouldn’t be noticeably off, it is usually 100 ms or less (many people don’;t bother syncing past 4-5 frames or 150 ms, in general… I am just more fastidious).

– I have a Ukranian dub. It is a fan-dub, but apparently has some TV pros working on it too. Dedicated In memory of Nikolai Alekseevich Lukasz. Translation and dubbing performed by “Three Dots.” This will be added, but it has some syncing issues that simple cutting and splicing with delays won’t completely fix. Not sure I want to get into transcoding it to wav to break into a million pieces to time stretch small bits diff amounts. All the HD rips out there have it as-is. I am just anal, I guess. Possibly I wil get a dubsub made from this, for Ukrainians to watch with, as I know of no actual Ukr subs. I suppose some other cyrillic subs may also be helpful, but I can’t edit these myself.

– found better sources (from the DVDs) for a few audio tracks.

– looking for more subs and things to add, so long as the subs are cleaned up (no misspellings or ocr errors, no grammatical nonsense, and other crap), Must be synced to the BD, and otherwise not a screwed up mess. I cannot edit other language’s subs! Contact me if you have good subs to add. If you need a workraw to sync subs, let me know.

LUPIN_III_TVSP_1995_PURSUIT_OF_HARIMAO’S_TREASURE

– I am redoing the dub sync from scratch. major issues due to a) Funimation truncating the tail off some audio at their chapter points, and b) having to cut AC3 files on AC3 packet boundaries (if I want to sync all these bits to one whole without transcoding audio at all).. These 2 issues together make me required to cut at the chapter point to add in delay, but trimming at the exact spot between audio in one chapter and the next is freaking impossible. Cutting at the AC3 boundaries creates a pause (stutter) either at the end of the previous chapter point or at the start of the next chapter’s audio. I have to fake it by adding unwanted delays at other points before and then re-try and other malarkey.

LUPIN III VS THE CLONE (AKA, MYSTERY OF MAMO, AKA THE SECRET OF MAMO)

– I originally planned to do the full Blu-Ray with subs and all the dubs thing myself, but it looks like AkaiShuichi is taking over a good chunk of the audio syncing, will sync subs. I am working on the Geneon 2.0 mix from the DiscoTek DVD. (edit: I may not even be doing that).

Well, I went well beyond my original prospects, and added a lot to the retail Japanese version. Originally I only expected to add the Streamline dub and maybe modified retail dubsubs and perhaps the Nikaku Animart script.

STORYBOARD FEATURE AND MENU AND SUBMENU NAVIGATION WITH REMOTE TO SELECT PiP:

….The first official English dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service was produced by Carl Macek of Streamline Pictures at the request of Tokuma Shoten for Japan Airlines’ international flights.[19] Kiki was portrayed by the late voice actress Lisa Michelson. This dub is only available in the Ghibli Laserdisc Box Set.[/color]

Disney released a subbed VHS version sometime in 1998 (now out-of-print), but it’s based on the Streamline/JAL English dub. Why did this happen? Ryoko Toyama explains:
Tokuma gave the Streamline script to Disney thinking that it was an accurate translation, and Disney worked on it. Several things that were not in the original Japanese script migrated to the BV subtitles.

All DVDs contain the same English subtitles (more appropriately called dubtitles).

This custom BD contains multiple English fansub scripts, as opposed to the dubsubs (based on the Streamline/JAL dub) which are present on ALL retail Ghibli BDs, DVDs and VHS of Kiki, as noted above from the nausicaa.net Q&A.
My custom also contains that ultra-rare Streamline dub, in the only version available in the wild at the moment, which only recently surfaced; as well it contains 5.1 versions of the Japanese audio and both versions of the Disney dub (1998 and 2010), and multiple other audio streams added as well.
I hope for this to be the definitive edition of this film for most people.

MORE ABOUT THE AUDIO:

The ultra-rare Streamline/JAL dub, found only on the Japanese Ghibli ga Ippai LD Box set: my copy is not in fantastic shape, but after years of searching, having finally found a copy of a cap is better than the big zero I had before. It is from a 20 year old VHS — i.e. LD to 20 year old VHS cap to low-fi MP3. I don’t know how many generations of VHS were in there, but also a VHS tape had clearly recorded Kiki over other things, as evidenced in the background chatter heard in quieter sections. There was also one tape stretch with terrible feedback that required fading out the noise and splicing and re-merging the sections to keep in sync. There is a passagge where dialog drops out there (just as Kiki is about to leave home for her journey, the local girls expressing jealousy are mildly interrupted) — it does so in the VHS, I only removed annoying noise. (I also tried to substitute a crossfade in of some of Disney’s dub or the Jpn to prevent the sudden loss of audio, but I couldn’t get it to work). The noise floor changed all over the place, especially around 1 hour 14 and a half minutes, so a noise reduction pass was done in Cool Edit (thanks neo1024 for the NR setting) — this also helped eliminate some background chatter from old VHS recordings under Kiki. As the quality was already hit, I din’t want to recompress to deteriorate it more, so I left in LPCM. This and true subs were my main original intent for making a custom BD.

I added both versions of the Disney dub (1998 and 2010) in 5.1, untouched from R1 DVDs. The BD has the newer 2010 version of their dub already on it, but only in 2.0 (all the retail BD audio is 2.0). I also added the 5.1 Japanese from a R1 DVD and a 5.1 Spanish (from R1) and 5.1 Cantonese (from R3HK), for the same reason as including the 5.1 of the 2010 Disney, since they are 5.1. I synced all these losslessly with delaycut.
I also added a bunch of other audio that was already a bit modified (PAL to NTSC timestretching, which for AC3 necessitates converting to wav then re-compressing to AC3 if they can’t all be LPCM); they needed more syncing and some were a bit shy on stretch factor: the Russian voice over dub really needs more timestretching, but i skipped doing it, since I don’t care enough about voice-over dubs, so i just di my best for an over-all sync; while the Dutch dub needed more timestretching, too, which I did for this one since it was an Nth generation trascoded file in AAC format, and needed recompressed to AC3 anyhow to use on a BD, so I converted AAC to wav, stretched the wav before recompressing in Sonic Audio Transcoder (Dolby Surround Encoding was set to on, though BDInfo doesn’t pick it up).

All in all there were eleven audio tracks added to this, making for a total of 17 audio choices!

MORE ABOUT THE FANSUB SUBTITLE SCRIPTS:

I have three full fansub subtitle tracks added here.
Two subtitle scripts are from ericf. He modified the NIKAKU ANIMART script, and also worked on one by CENTRAL ANIME, and made more changes to them based on the Japanese retail subtitles. I also modified some in each, especially to the CA script (mostly in the English song lyrics). My Japanese is rudimentary at best, but I can change awkward English and klunky song lyrics to flow better.
texhonolize also provided a script based upon NIKAKU ANIMART script, a good bit less modified if that is more to your liking.

All in all I added 4 TRUE English subtitle tracks (the remaining one is songs/signs for the Jpn songs, to go with Japanese audio, Streamline dub or 2010 Disney Eng dub; it won’t go with the 1998 Disney Eng, nor any of the other dubs, since they all localized it with very different music at OP/ED, and also music in the movie is changed, and even some sfx… some really changed the BGM music dramatically, others did less so but changed it; I think some was done by Joe Hisaishi still, just scored differently. All of the custom subtitle tracks are stylized very differently, aside from having differences in script. It may not please you that I treated it this way, but it suits me.

I would have subtitled and dubbed the Storyboard feature, but we are lucky it even made it on here in raw. More on that below….

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHORING

This was a difficult disc to reauthor. Ghibli uses The Panasonic Authoring Center Roppongi (PACR), which creates things in such a way that Scenarist wants to commit suicide upon trying to mux the disc — even without any subs or audio added, just the original disc won’t remux directly back to BD at all. I had to creatively work around tons of issues. I honestly thought much of the disc would need stripped in order to mux. It actually was, but I was able to edit the stuff back in after muxing, so no great loss.

For whatever reason, the flags to default to certain audio and subs is not being honored when I put them in this disc.
I blame Panasonic’s weird authoring system.

fwiw, hamletiii, had repeatedly suggested not to go near Ghibli BDs.
He first told me this years ago with Ponyo. Then, recent examples, when I asked about really buggy shit in this disc, he maintained the same thought, that Ghibli BDs are quite the buggered pain (my words).

I went in knowing the disc was going to be tough, and it met my expectations… and more.

Quote:

The original disc is authored by a different software – presumably some customized Panasonic system. It doesn’t follow the BD spec that Scenarist likes to see. Any studio Ghibli just give up, problem solved.

then….
Quote:

Too much trouble, just give up.

Me being stubborn, I kept at it. =P

Next I plan on attempting to do Totoro, too. :w00t:

If anyone can translate all the menu and submenu buttons and options, I will customize that as well in bdedit and photoshop and upload a version 2 for anyone wanting a localized menu. It can’t be done in Photoshope Designer and imported to Scenarist, since many of the menus and extras m2ts/clpi/mpls files would not mux in Scenarist BD, and had to be stripped from before muxing, and re-added after muxing, and edited back in.

Huge thanks go out to: strathacker at originaltrilogy for sharing the Streamline dub cap mp3. Obtaining this was the impetuous force that led to finally do this custom BD. I wanted to add this and real subs to DVDs and BDs of Kiki for ages. wilfried & neo1024, both for going above and beyond helping me get some files and in many other ways, too many to count!; ericf for his own custom mutations of the CA and NA fansubs scripts, his edits made with aid of Jpn official subs;texhonolize for working on a different version of the NA script and sharing with me;
also thanks to JackJack, cjdark (for R1 audio), ANDARIAL (for the other R1 audio), and Krudda for their help along the way!
anyone else I forgot — I apologize!

If anyone notices any errors, please let me know. Be specicific. If it is a flicker in subs or some glitch — tell me WHICH sub/audio tracks and at what time it occurs.
I cannot realistically QC eleven audio tracks and four subs tracks, for just a fan project, and make sure all the disc is working correctly again as the retail does, after having to strip things out for muxing and editing back in! Especially the PiP on the Storyboard feature kept breaking for some odd reason.

I have done QC on the PC only with Sonic QC, PowerDVD 12, and TMT 5, as well as MPC-HC. I don’t have rewriteable BD50s any longer, and cannot afford them, so this has not been tested on a burnt disc on a hardware SAP.
NB: PowerDVD 12 kind of plays the PiP, but disables moving it around and accessing the submenu after you select the placement. It does the same on the retail. There is an update for BDs for PDVD12, but since I use a cracked version I haven’t tried it out. It worked as expected in TMT5, and definitely was fine in Sonic QC. Subs are not appearing correctly in MPC-HC, and in the past I found VLC mungs all my BDs, so both MPC-HC and VLC are NOT suggested for playback at all! Because of this, my full resolution screens with subs can’t be taken in MPC-HC; I will have to use Sonic QC and use windows screen capture at desktop resolution (less than 1080 in my case).

Screens of subs. Just to see what the fansub streams look like!(NOTE: MPC-HC was not properly displaying the subs — they were off-center and some larger DisplaySets didn’t show in screens at all, just like vlc does, so you’ll have to suffer non-full-rez screens taken at desktop resolution with Sonic QC playing movie).

I am accepting donations for a new HDD and for rewriteable BD50s to QC discs like this on my Samsung Stand Alone Player, so I can continue to make more projects like this and make sure they work on more than a PC. This took over 250 GB HDD space across a few drives at some points, requiring me to delete other raws to complete, among other obstacles. I really don’t like doing that sort of thing. Any help is greatly appreciated!

See my profile or blog for a list of many of my current intended DVD and BD projects, including Totoro and Panda! Go Panda! Blu-rays.

Akira and Gundam Wing Endless Waltz BDs are both done, except waiting to try to localize the menu options into English and add buttons for the added audio and subs.

I seed when I am able to. I may go offline till morning, shortly after uploading. Be patient and you’ll get it.

(It would also be swell if the encoders that find this might think of giving some credit out when they make their encodes, rather than passing it all off as your own work…. even, or should I say, especially when some of them can’t be arsed into helping me get the audio from the R1 DVDs for making this custom, nor even respond to pms). :o)

Lupin III First TV Series – R2J – I only have volumes 2 and 5 so far. I am hoping to obtain the rest.

I also have Blu-Rays of the Castle of Cagliostro, the Secret of Mamo (aka Lupin vs Clone), and Lupin vs Conan. But if you read my pleading for donations, you will know these cannot be muxed until I can reinstall Windows which will require a 2 TB HDD.

The DVDs alone will take a long time, since I have very little HDD space to even work on.

Please consider a donation if you want to see me work any faster on some of these titles, and please note what you anticipate the most.

So I have the Japanese Cagliostro Blu-Ray, as well as the R1 Manga 2 disc edition and the R2 UK release which offers the older Streamline dub (obviously this would needed to be slowed down for the other releases as it is PAL, but I have done this a bit before, although this Cagliostro BD is 29.970 fps and not 23.976).

Anyhow, my plan is to add both the Streamline and Manga dubs, as well as a few different sub tranlations. I have to remember, if I use it, to transcribe part of Manga’s hard-coded on-screen text (here’s hoping).
If I can get some tips and help, I would also like to include the extras from both the R1 and R2UK DVDs and add them to the BD. The R2UK may pose issues for some players though, as it is PAL (i.e. it is 25 fps). Some US players (probably the NTSC PS3, too) don’t like 25 or 50 fps. I guess I am lucky that my Samsung player shifts frame rates if needed, and my (dying*) Samsung HDTV seems to play native 25 fps PAL and 50 fps BDs discs just fine from SAPs and my PC.

The Blu-Ray demuxed fine in BD Reauthor Pro and loads fine into SCenarist. I just don’t know that I want to start all this for yet another disc I can’t MUX (the last stage in Scenarist custom discs, aside from QC – quality Checking).

I guess I can always go ahead and time the subs and dubs, render the subs, then make an AVCHD or BD5 or BD9 with tsmuxer to keep me happy until I can MUX the full BD, after I have a new HDD. I have done some decent encodes with x264 before (I will post some screens some time of some of my BD25s and BD50s, etc.) One thing about this is that it is interlaced MBAFF and I am not a greatly experienced encoder so proper IVTC and deinterlacing can be a bit of a black art to me. I understand enough to know it can be confusing, and to know I wish I had a CUDA gpu just for using with neuron2’s NV decoders for avisynth, to use on interlaced sources (especially those evil interlaced VC-1 videos).

*yes, sadly for a few months now my Samsung 1080p has been dying. Black spots of death. It is only a couple of years old. I do have an extended warranty, but when I exchange it I will have to pay, out-of-pocket, any taxes on it, and I will have to pay for any new warranty, also out-of-pocket. For this TV that is in the neighborhood of several hundred dollars, which I don’t have. I can’t even replace my PSU on my other desktop with some low-end crap, or get a HDD or 2 to backup and reinstall Windows on this PC, or to replace a blown tire on my car. I just hope that the number of black spots don’t keep populating, and they don’t get too big. They are growing and they are multiplying. They also move around…. weird.